EPA immediately yanks study showing weed killer doesn’t cause cancer

Jazz ShawPosted at 6:21 pm on May 10, 2016

Before jumping into this rather odd story, one quick question: is the EPA really the appropriate agency to oversee a study on whether or not some product causes cancer? I mean, if the Center for Disease Control wants to be in the business of studying gun violence instead of the Department of Justice in general or the FBI in particular, I suppose it fits in with the “logic” of the federal government, but their main mission seems to be rather far afield from medical work.

We’ll leave that mystery for another day and get on to the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency recently did, in fact, release a study which shows that glyphosate – the primary ingredient in general purpose week killers like Roundup – is not carcinogenic. Then, for reasons which are not yet entirely clear, they almost immediately pulled it down from their web site. This caught the attention of The Daily Caller.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials were quick to take off the internet a report debunking claims made by activists and United Nations officials that the chemical compound used to kill weeds is cancer causing.

EPA pulled the report by their cancer assessment review committee, or CARC, after it had been “inadvertently” published online Friday, the agency told Reuters. EPA said the CARC report was “not final” and subsequent steps of review were needed before it could be published online. It was taken offline Monday afternoon.

CARC’s report, however, has already caused an uproar among environmentalists who want to see the chemical glyphosate, commonly found in weed killers and fertilizers, banned. Activists commonly cite a 2015 report by the United Nations’ International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic in humans.”

Ah, it’s all becoming more clear now. The same groups that want to ban GMO foods have gotten onboard with the United Nations for a study they published which said that glyphosate might cause cancer in humans. This study contradicted those findings, saying that some of the tests couldn’t even be reproduced, and their findings matched up with four other studies which the IARC ignored including one from the European Food Safety Authority. All of these found a negative correlation.

That’s good news for me since I’ve been using Roundup for years (and just did along my fence line last night, in fact) and I’d hate to find this out now. But since a progressive movement was outraged by the results, the EPA suddenly deleted the study from their website claiming that it needed further review and was not final. I’ll be waiting with anticipation for what this report looks like if and when it’s ever finalized and released. In the meantime, it’s spring and I’ve got a lot of weeds to kill.